O Christmas Tree

I realized last night that this is becoming an annual tradition for me...I fully intend for us to get a tree and decorate right after Thanksgiving. Then, on or about the second week of December, when we haven't gotten down a single box or purchased a tree, I begin lamenting that Christmas is ALMOST HERE and there's NO POINT in decorating now since we'll just have to PUT IT ALL AWAY again in a few short weeks.

Oh well, I think to myself, there's always next year.

And then Abel magically appears with a tree and we get the decorations down and it all happens. And I savor each and every nativity scene (I have A LOT) and Santa and ornament and our home looks so lovely and for two or three weeks I thoroughly enjoy it.

Our very first Christmas together as an engaged couple was a challenging one. We had gotten engaged that previous summer (on my birthday!) and Abel found out around Thanksgiving that he was being laid off. Needless to say, we were broke. I had a very, very cozy (read: tiny) apartment to myself and Abel lived in a fairly gross house with 2-3 other guys (it varied) so we spent most of our time at my apartment. Did I mention we were broke? Each weekend we walked over to Eastern Market and as the holidays approached, we admired the beautiful evergreens for sale. Since we would both be traveling to our respective families for Christmas and we were broke (did I mention that?) we only admired them from afar.

Then, one evening I came home from work to find Abel at my apartment with a wonderful surprise. He had literally emptied both his and my change jars, counted out the coins and purchased a diminutive (but quite lovely) Christmas tree with about 75 cents to spare! Decorations were sparse that year but it probably was the most special tree we'll ever have.

Yesterday afternoon I came home to find a Christmas tree on our side porch. We're going to decorate it with Lucas tonight!



Original post by Smiling Mama. Thanks for reading!